Immigrating Fictions: Unfailing Mediation in Dictée and Becoming Madame Mao

Abstract

* 1 * She originality of the Brechtian sign, Roland Barthes once said, comes from its always being read twice. What Brecht gives us to read, Barthes wrote in 1975, is, via a kind of disconnect, the look of a reader, not the object of that look; that object only reaches us through the intellectual (alienated) act of a first reader who is already on (Brecht 265; my translation). Barthes meant that objects on the Brechtian stage never appear on stage as themselves. They are instead objects-facts, things, people, situations-as someone has perceived them, elements of a story told by an actor who performs a relation to the objects of his regard that subjects them, in advance, to reading. From the edge of the proscenium, the audience sees the reading, not the objects, and sees simultaneously the possibility of the objects otherwise. The Brechtian theater thus shows that an object is always someone's object, that any given thing, person, or situation has already emerged, prior to any single perception of it, as the reading of someone else whose first was simply to make this object the object of a look, thereby differentiating it from the seamless fabric of the real. Like the Brechtian sign, a translated text appears before its audience only after passing through the alienated act of a first reader. There it testifies to the awkward and complex relationship between author and translator, between the translation that appears and the

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